Deja News doesn_t want to be data news.

As first reported by Wired News, Deja News has been stealthily recording the IP addresses of users who click a "mailto:" email link on a newsgroup posting. If the email_s sender had registered with Deja News, the company could associate the sender_s profile with the recipient_s email address. The company could even add details about the subject of the newsgroup message that prompted the email response. The potential for tracking correspondence proved worrisome to R. Smith -- the programmer who noticed the bug last weekend -- because Deja News archives messages from Usenet. The many thousands of discussion forums that make up Usenet are not proprietary to Deja News, which simply provides a Web gateway to the postings. The IP tracking also raised the hackles of privacy advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union, that was concerned that the company could be tracking private correspondence. But Deja News said Friday afternoon that it would head off any chance of that happening. "We have used none of this information for any purpose other than to better understand aggregate usage patterns," said Deja News CEO T. Phillips in an email to reporters. "However, we recognize the concern of our users over potential misuse. Therefore, we are implementing a plan to discontinue the collection of this data." Philips said the service had been collecting the data for about a year. He gave no indication as to when the practice will end. The Deja News privacy policy states that the company will "give notice to everyone prior to collecting any personally identifiable information." The company is a member of Truste, a nonprofit watchdog group that makes sure members adhere to its privacy policies. Truste said that it was investigating the IP tracking issue to see if there was any chance the company had violated its privacy-practices statement.